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List of house types
Houses can be built in a large variety of configurations. A basic division is between free-standing or detached dwellings and various types of attached or multi-user dwellings. Both sorts may vary greatly in scale and amount of accommodation provided. Although there appear to be many different types, many of the variations listed below are purely matters of style rather than spatial arrangement or scale. Some of the terms listed are only used in some parts of the English speaking world. Detached dwellings / single-unit housing * A-frame: so-called because of the appearance of the structure, namely steep roofline. * The Addison house: a type of low-cost house with concrete floors and cavity walls made of concrete blocks, mostly built in the United Kingdom and in Ireland during 1920 through 1921 to provide housing for soldiers, sailors, and airmen who had returned home from World War I in and around France.6172 - Investigation of Non-Traditional Concrete and Timber-Framed Properties - Structural Survey Report, South Cambridgeshire District Council http://www.scambs.gov.uk/admin/documents/retrieve.asp?pk_document=906084 * The Airey house: a type of low-cost house that was developed in the United Kingdom during in the 1940s by Sir Edwin Airey, and then widely-constructed between 1945 and 1960 to provide housing for soldiers, sailors, and airmen who had returned home from World War II. These are recognizable by their precast concrete columns and by their walls made of precast "ship-lap" concrete panels. * Barndominium: a type of house that includes living space attached to a workshop, a barn (typically for horses), or a large vehicles such as a Recreational Vehicle or a good-sized recreational boat. * Bay-and-gable: a type of house typically found in the older areas of Toronto, Ontario. * Bungalow: any simple, single-story house without any basement. * Cape Cod: a popular design that originated in the coastal area of New England, especially in eastern Massachusetts. * Cape Dutch: popular in the Western Cape, South Africa, region. * Castle: primarily a defensive structure/dwelling build during the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, and also during the 18th Century and the 19th Century. * Chalet bungalow: popular in England, a combination of a house and a bungalow. * Chattel house: a small wooden house occupied by working-class people on Barbados. * Colonial house: a traditional style of house that orginated in the eastmost United States of America. * Conch House: a traditional style of house that was built in some of the Southern United States. * Cottage: is usually a small country dwelling, but weavers' cottages are three-storied townhouses with the top floor reserved for the working quarters. * American Craftsman House ** Deck House: a custom-built post-and-beam house using high-quality woods and masonry. * Creole cottage: a type of house native to the Gulf Coast of the United States, roughly corresponding to the location of the former colonial settlements of the French in Louisiana, Southern Mississippi, and Lower Alabama. * Cracker House: a style of wood-framwork house built rather widely in the 19th century in Florida, Southern Georgia, and South Georgia. Note that the former Atlanta Crackers pro baseball team has its home in Atlanta, Georgia, because of the many "Crackers" who lived in Georgia decades ago. * The detached single-family house is any free-standing house that is structurally separated from its neighboring houses, usually separated by open land, making it distinctive from such dwellings as duplexes, townhouses, and condominiums. * Dogtrot house:: two houses connected by an open breezeway. * Earth sheltered:: houses using dirt ("earth") piled against it exterior walls for thermal mass, which reduces heat flow into or out of the house, maintaining a more steady indoor temperature. * A farmhouse: is the main residence house on a farm, or a house built with the same type of styling - located anywhere * Faux chateau (originating in the 1980s): a notably-inflated in size and price American suburban house with non-contextual French Provençal architectural elements. * American Foursquare house - to be explained later. * Gablefront house (or a Gablefront cottage): a generic house type that has a gable roof that faces its street or avenue.Ridge Historical SocietySee the novel The House of Seven Gables, by the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. * Gambrel: also known as the Dutch Gambrel - to be explained later * Geodesic dome:: a rugged domed design, using strong metal components, that was pioneered by the architect Buckminster Fuller in the United States of America in the mid-20th Century. * The Georgian House' is built with the style of Georgian architecture that became popular during the time of King George I through King George IV and King William IV of the United Kingdom. * Hawksley BL8 bungalow: an aluminum siding-clad timber-framed house built in Great Britain mostly during the 1950s as housing for soldiers, sailors, and airmen who had returned home from World War II. * I-house: a traditional British folk house, which became popular in the Middle Atlantic and the Southern American Colonies before the beginning of the American Revolutionary War.West Central Neighborhood Association * Igloo: an Inuit-Eskimo temporary or emergency that was made of knife-sliced blocks of packed snow and/or ice in the Arctic regions of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Siberian Russia. * Indian vernacular * Izba: a traditional Russian wooden country house. * Konak: a type of Turkish house that was widely-built during the time of the Ottoman Empire in Turkey, northern Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, northern Iraq, etc. . * Link-detached: adjacent detached properties that do not have a party wall, but which are linked by their garages - and so presenting a single frontage to their street or avenue. * Linked house's are "row-houses" or a "semi-detached houses" that are linked structurally only in their foundations. Above ground, these houses appear to be detached houses. Linking up their foundations cuts the cost of constructing them. * 'Log cabin: a house built by American, Canadian, and Russian frontiersmen and their families which was built of solid, unsquared wooden logs. * Lustron house: a type of prefabricated house. * Manor House: a large Medieval country house, or one built later on of a similar design, which formerly was the primary dwelling of the nobleman and his family, and also the administrative hub of a Feudal manor, and which was also the lowest unit of land organization and use in the Feudal system during the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages in Europe: in other words, before the ride of the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment both of which caused the fall of the Feudal system and serfdom, except for in Russia, where the serfs and vassals were not set free until the second half of the 19th Century (the 1850s through the 1890s). * Mansion: a quite-large and usually-luxurious detached house. See also: Manor house, and Georgian House above * McMansion: a formulaic, inflated suburban house with references to historical styles of architecture, such as Georgian Architecture and the Manor House mentioned above. * Manufactured house: a prefabricated house that is assembled on the permanent site on which it will sit. To be explained later. * Mews property: a mews is an urban stable-block that has been converted into residential properties. The houses are converted into ground floor garages with a small flat above which used to house the ostler. * Microhouse: a dwelling that fulfils all the requirements of habitation (shelter, sleep, cooking, heating, toilet) in a very compact space. These are quite common in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc. See external links.http://www.motherearthnews.com/Green_Home_Building/1995_April_May/The_World_of_the_Microhouse, http://www.motherearthnews.com/printable/1998_June_July/The_Rustic__Temporary__Microhouse, and http://inhabitat.com/blog/2005/08/22/micro-mini-home/ for examples of microhouses. * Monolithic dome: a structure cast in one piece over a wooden form, usually of built of concrete and Portland cement. * Microapartment: rather common in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc. These small single-room dwellings contain a kitchen, a bathroom, a sleeping area, etc., in one place, usually in a multistory building. * Mudhif: a traditional reed house made by the Madan people of Iraq. * Octagon house: a house of symmetrical octagonal floor plan, popularized briefly during the 19th century by Orson Squire Fowler. * Patio house * Pole house: a timber house in which a set of vertical poles carry the load of all of its suspended floors and roof, allowing all of its walls to be non-load-bearing. * Prefabricated house: a house whose main structural sections were manufactured in a factory, and then transported to their final building site to be assembled upon a concrete foundation, which had to be poured locally. * Ranch: a rambling single-story house, often containing a garage and sometimes constructed over a basement. * Queenslander: a house most commonly built in the tropical areas of Australia, especially in the State of Queensland and in the Northern Territory. These are constructed on top of high concrete piers or else upon the stumps of felled trees in order to allow cooling breezes to flow beneath them, and often they have a wide veranda, or porch, that runs partially or completely the way around the house. See the Cracker House, above, which was quite similar to this one. * A Roundhouse dwelling: is a kind of a house built with a circular plan. This kind was constructed in Western Europe before the Conquest by the Roman legions. After this conquest, houses were usually built in the Roman style that came from Italy. * The Saltbox: was a style of wooden house that was widespread during Colonial Times in New England. * Split-level house: a design of house that was commonly built during the 1950s and 1960s. It has two nearly-equal sections that are located on two different levels, with a short stairway in the corridor connecting them. This kind of house is quite suitable for building on slanted or hilly land. * "Sears Catalog Home": an owner-built "kit" houses that were sold by the Sears, Roebuck and Co. corporation via catalog orders from 1906 to 1940. * Shack: a small, usually rundown, wooden building. * Shotgun house: a popular style of house that was built years ago in and around New Orleans, Louisiana. * Souterrain: an earthen dwelling typically deriving from Neolithic Age or Bronze Age times. * Stilt houses or Pile dwellings: houses raised on stilts over the surface of the soil or a body of water. * Snout house: a house with the garage door being the closest part of the dwelling to the street. * Splits ** Backsplit: multi-level house that appears as a bungalow from the front elevation. ** Frontsplit: multilevel house that appears as a two-story house in front and a bungalow in the back. It is the opposite of a backsplit and is a rare configuration. ** Sidesplit: multi-level house where the different levels are visible from the front elevation view. * Storybook houses: 1920s houses inspired by Hollywood set design. * Tipi - to be explained later * Tree house: a house built among the branches or around the trunk of one or more mature trees and does not rest on the ground. * Trullo: a traditional Apulian stone dwelling with conical roof. * Tudor house:: Built according to the style of the Tudor architecture that was produced in Great Britain during the time of the royal House of Tudor, i.e., between the years 1485 and 1603. ** Mock Tudor: a modern emulation of Tudor architecture. * Underground home: an dwelling dug and constructed underground * Unit: a type of medium-density housing that is usually found in Australia and New Zealand. * Unity house: a type of low-cost dwelling built in Great Britain during the 1940s and 1950s. These contain walls made of stacked concrete panels between concrete pillars. About 19,000 of these houses were constructed in the United Kingdom. * Vernacular house: house constructed in the manner of the aboriginal population, designed close to nature, using locally-available materials. * Victorian house * Villa: originally an upper-class country house, though since its origins in Roman times the idea and function of a villa has evolved considerably. * Wealden hall house a type of vernacular medieval timber-framed yeoman's house traditional in the south east of England. * Wimpey house: a low-cost house built in the UK from the 1940s onwards. The walls are of no-fines concrete. About 300,000 were constructed. * Yaodong: a dugout used as an abode or shelter in northern China, especially on the Loess Plateau. Semi-detached dwellings * Duplex house: commonly refers to two separate residences, attached side-by-side, but the term is sometimes used to mean stacked apartments on two different floors (particularly in urban areas such as New York and San Francisco). (See ) The duplex house often looks like either two houses put together, or as a large single home, and both legally and structurally, literally shares a wall between halves. The duplex home can appear as a single townhouse section with two different entrances, though the occasional duplex with a shared common entrance and entry hall have been constructed. The jargon terms "triplex" and "four-plex" are contrived names that refer to similar structures with three or four housing units, or floors if referring to apartments, and again the characteristic sharing of structural walls, as are the and six pack forms that adapted the savings in materials and costs of a shared load bearing wall. * Two-family home or two-family house: the generic American real estate business jargon for a small apartment house or a duplex house that contain two dwelling units. In advertisements, "two-family home" is the generally-used jargon. * (A Double decker building plan): since real-estate advertising generally specifies correctly whether the two-family home is a duplex-house type these are usually more desirable for both rentals or purchases. * Semi-detached: two houses joined together; compare duplex. Attached dwellings / Multi-unit housing Specific terms under various American federal, state, or local laws dealing with fair housing, truth in advertising, and so forth, have been proscribed and engender specific legal meanings. For example, in American housing codes, all "apartments" must contain a kitchen, bathing facilities, and a sleeping area, or else that term may not be used. This generates various differences within the English-speaking world, and the terms such as "single-family", "two-family", or "three-family" building, residence, house, home, or property can be generic and thus convey little or no building plan (style of building) information. Such terminology is most common in advertising and real-estate markets that offer leasing of such units, or sales of such buildings. * Apartment: a relatively self-contained housing unit in a building which is often rented out to one person or a family, or two or more people sharing a lease in a partnership, for their exclusive use. Sometimes called a flat or digs (slang). Some locales have legal definitions of what constitutes an apartment. In some locations, "apartment" denotes a building that was built specifically for such units, whereas "flat" denotes a unit in a building that had been originally built as a single-family house, but later on subdivided into some multi-unit house type.http://www.apartmentchicagoweb.com * Apartment building, Block of flats: a multi-unit dwelling made up of several (generally four or more) apartments. Contrast this with the two-family house and the three-family dwelling. * Aul: a type of fortified village found throughout the Caucasus Mountains, especially in Dagestan. * Barracks: a type of military housing, formerly connoting a large "open bay" with rows of bunk beds and attached bathroom facilities, but during the most recent several decades for the American Armed Forces most of the new housing units for unmarried servicemen have been constructed with a dormitory-style layout housing two to four servicement. This dormitory-styling providing additional privacy has been found to promote the retention of trained personnel in the all-volunteer Armed Forces of the United States. * Basement apartment * Brownstone: a Northeastern United States type of housing unit: see rowhouse. * Bedsit (Mess): A British expression (short for bed-sitting room) for a single-roomed dwelling which usually contains very sparse furniture and is very compact in design. Literally a bed and a place to sit. * Choultry: a South-Indian Hindu-Caravanserai * Condominium: a form of ownership with individual apartments for everyone, and co-ownership (by percentages) of all of the common areas, such as corridors, hallways, stairways, lobbies, recreation rooms, porches, rooftops, and any outdoor areas of the grounds of the buildings. * Deck access: a block of "flats" which are accessed from a walkway that is open to the elements. * Flat: In Great Britain and Ireland, this means exactly the same as an "apartment". In and around San Francisco, Calif., this term means an apartment that takes up an entire floor of a large house, usually one that has been converted from an older Victorian house. * 2-Flat, 3-Flat, and 4-Flat houses: Houses or buildings with 2, 3, or 4 flats, respectively, especially when each of the flats takes up one entire floor of the house. There is a common stairway in the front and often in the back providing access to all the flats. 2-Flats and sometimes 3-flats are common in certain older neighborhoods. * Four-plus-One: a large apartment building usually without an elevator that has four floors of apartments on top of parking. It was particularly popular in Chicago during the 1960s and 1970s, especially on the city's north side. (National Fire Codes in the USA and real estate law require any five story dwelling structure to have an elevator.) * Garage-apartment: an apartment over a garage; if the garage is attached, the apartment will have a separate entrance from the main house. * Garalow: a portmateau word "garage" + "bungalow"; similar to a garage-apartment, but with the apartment and garage at the same level. * Garden apartment: a building style usually characterized by two story, semi-detached buildings, each floor being a separate apartment. * Garden flat: a flat which is at garden (ground) level in a multilevel house or apartment building, especially in the case of Georgian and Victorian terraced housing which has been sub-divided into separate dwellings. * Housing cooperative (or Co-op): a form of ownership in which a non-profit corporation owns the entire apartment building or development and residents own shares in the corporation that correspond to their apartment and a percentage of common areas. In Australia this corresponds with a "company title" apartment. * Housing project: a North American term for government-owned housing for low-income tenants (aka Public housing or Social housing). * Ksar: a village consisting of generally attached houses, widespread among the oasis populations of the Maghreb (northern Africa) * Loft or warehouse conversion can be an apartment building wherein part of the unit, usually consisting of the bedroom(s) and/or a second bedroom level bath is sub-divided vertically within the structurally tall bay between the structural floors of a former factory or warehouse building. The lofts created in such are locally supported by columns and bearing walls and not part of the overall original load bearing structure. * Maisonette: an apartment / flat on two levels with internal stairs, or which has its own entrance at street level. * Mess: a building or flat with single bedroom per tenant and shared facilities like toilets and kitchens. These are popular with students, bachelors or low wage earners in the Indian subcontinent. It is similar to the bedsit in the UK. Some variants include multiple tenants per bedroom and inclusion of a centralized maid service or cooked meals with tenancy. * Mother-in-law apartment: small apartment either at the back, in the basement, or on an upper level subdivision of the main house, usually with a separate entrance (also known as a "Granny flat" in the UK, Australia and New Zealand). If it is a separate structure from the main house, it is called a 'granny cottage' or a 'doddy house'. Such Secondary suites are often efficiency or two room apartments but always have kitchen facilities (which is usually a legal requirement of any apartment). * Penthouse: the top floor of multi-story building * Plattenbau (East German) / Panelák (Czech, Slovak): a communist-era tower block that is made of slabs of concrete put together. * Q-type: townhouse built mainly in housing estates in the UK beginning in the late 20th century. The houses are arranged in blocks of four with each house at a corner of the block.[http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090322141617AA0v9Zz What is a "q type" property?] on answers.yahoo.com, unreferenced, retrieved 2010-02-19 * Railroad apartment (or railroad flat): a type of apartment that is in a building built on a very narrow lot (usually about as wide as a railroad car, or Pullman car sections thereof). * Rooming house: a type of Single Room Occupancy building where most washing, kitchen and laundry facilities are shared between residents, which may also share a common suite of living rooms and dining room, with or without board arrangements. When board is provided (no longer common), a common dining time and schedule is imposed by the landlord who in such cases also serves as an innkeeper of sorts. In Australia and the United States, any housing accommodation with 4 or more bedrooms can be regarded as a rooming house if each bedroom is subject to individual tenancy agreements. In the U.S., rooming house lease agreements typically run for very short periods, usually week to week, or a few days at a time. Transient housing arrangements for longer term tenancies are implemented by a "rider" on a case by case basis, if local laws permit. * Rowhouse (USA); also called "Terraced home" (USA); also called "Townhouse": 3 or more houses in a row sharing a "party" wall with its adjacent neighbour. In New York and Boston, "Brownstones" are rowhouses. Rowhouses are typically multiple stories. The term townhouse is currently coming into wider use in the UK, but terraced house (not "terraced home") is more common. * Shophouse: the name given in Southeast Asia to a terraced two to five storey urban building featuring a shop or other public activity on the street level, with residential accommodation on upper floors. * Single Room Occupancy or SRO: a studio apartment, usually occurring with a block of many similar apartments, intended for use as public housing. They may or may not have their own washing, laundry, and kitchen facilities. In the United States, lack of kitchen facilities prevents use of the term "apartment", so such would be classified as a or hotel. * Six-pack: In New England (USA), this refers to a stick-built block of 6 apartments comprising (duplexed) two three story s built side by side sharing one wall, a common roof, lot, yards (lawns and gardens, if any), parking arrangements, and basement, but possessing separately metered electric, and separate hot water and heating or air conditioning. In Australia, it refers to a style of apartments that were constructed during the 1960s, 70s and early 80s, usually comprising a single, masonry-built block containing 4 to 8 walk-up apartments (though sometimes, many more), of between 2 and 3 stories in height, with car parking at the side or rear. * Studio apartment or Studio flat (UK), or Bachelor apartment or Efficiency apartment: a suite with a single room that doubles as living/sitting room and bedroom, with a kitchenette and bath squeezed in off to one side. The unit is designed for a single occupant or possibly a couple. Especially in Canada and South Africa, also called bachelor, or bachelorette if very small. * Tenement: a multi-unit dwelling usually of frame construction, quite often brick veneered, made up of several (generally many more than four to six) apartments (i.e. a large apartment building) that can be up to five stories. Tenements do not generally have elevators. In the United States the connotation sometimes implies a run-down or poorly-cared-for building. It often refers to a very large apartment building usually constructed during the late nineteenth to early twentieth century era sited in cities or company towns. * Terraced house: Since the late 18th century is a style of housing where (generally) identical individual houses are conjoined into rows - a line of houses which abut directly on to each other built with shared party walls between dwellings whose uniform fronts and uniform height created an ensemble that was more stylish than a "rowhouse". However this is also the UK term for a "rowhouse" regardless of whether the houses are identical or not. ** Back-to-back: Terraced houses which also adjoin a second terrace to the rear. They were a common form of housing for workers during the Industrial Revolution in England. * Tower block or Apartment tower: a high-rise apartment building. * Townhouse: also called Rowhouse (US). In the UK, a townhouse is a traditional term for an upper class house in London (in contrast with country house), and is now coming into use as a term for new terraced houses, which are often three stories tall with a garage on the ground floor. ** Stacked townhouse: Units are stacked on each other; units may be multilevel; all units have direct access from the outside. * Three family home or Three family house — U.S. real estate and advertising term for several configurations of apartment classed dwelling buildings including: ** Triple decker: a three-family apartment house, usually of frame construction, in which all three apartment units are stacked on top of one another. (For additional characteristics, also see below.) ** Two decker: a two family house consisting of stacked apartments that frequently have similar or identical floor plans. Some two deckers, usually ones starting as single family homes, have one or both floors sub-divided and are therefore three or four-family dwellings. Some have external stairways giving a totally separate entrance, and some, usually those which have been a single family house now sub-divided, are similar to the Maisonette plan but sharing a common external 'main entrance' door and lock, and a main internal hall with stairways letting to the separate apartments. (For additional characteristics, also see below.) ;Multifamily home features :: Tenants usually have some portion of the basement and/or common attic. :: Fire regulations aggressively require a separate emergency egress for all apartments under U.S. laws and national fire codes. :: Utilities are either paid as part of the rent, or (now predominant) the units have separately provided heat, air conditioning, electrical distribution panels and meters, and sometimes (uncommonly) water metering, separating all secondary housing costs by rental unit. Common lighting may or may not be off a separate meter and circuitry in subdivided former single family dwellings. :: leasehold documents will specify other common factors such as specific parking rights, rights to common spaces such as lawn and gardens on the premises, storage or garage (usually a detached unit, that cannot economically be converted into an additional housing unit) facilities and details such as who has responsibility for upkeep, snow removal, lawn care, and so forth. * Tong Lau: a type of shophouse found in southern China. * Unit: a type of Medium-density housing found in Australia and New Zealand. * Vatara: a housing complex, mainly found in urban Karnataka, India, similar to an apartment complex, but with mostly two stories and homes in a row on each floor. Movable dwellings * Park home, also called Mobile home: it is a prefabricated house that is manufactured off-site. * Tent: usually a lightweight, moveable structure. * Travel trailer or Caravan * Yurt or Ger: used by nomads in the steppes of Central Asia. * '''Houseboat See also * Cohousing * Company town * City block * Home * House * Gated community * Intentional Community * Planned Unit Development * Real estate * Shelter * Spite house, which may or may not be attached to other structures * Timeshare, form of vacation property References External links * House Images * Architecture Types Category:House types it:Unità abitativa nl:Lijst van woningtypen